1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to an apparatus and method for controlling a message communications load, and, more specifically, to an apparatus and method for controlling a message communications load that calculates a message load based on the number of messages, time stamps of the messages and the occupation time of the messages and adjusts communications intervals of messages according to the calculated load.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, digital technology has been introduced in most vehicles, and thus the number of electronic devices mounted on vehicles has increased. Accordingly, it is necessary to control vehicle systems in consideration of many variables inside and outside the vehicles. To this end, an electronic control unit (ECU) for controlling all parts of the vehicle such as the driving system and the steering system as well as the engine is employed.
Such ECU conducts communications based on an operating system (OS) for a vehicle. A typical communications scheme is a controller area network (CAN). The CAN communications is a communications standard designed for communications between individual electronic control devices in a vehicle without a host computer.
In such CAN communications, the complexity of the network increases with the number of individual electronic control devices. To avoid this, a gateway processor is used. The gateway processor relays the message exchange between the individual networks to reduce the network complexity of the CAN communications and facilitate communications between the networks.
Even with such a gateway processor, if the number of transmitted/received messages increases suddenly, an overload occurs in the gateway processor, which may result in a communications failure and a failure of the entire system. To address such a problem, there have been proposed a variety of approaches to control message communications loads.
However, according to an existing method for controlling message communications load, the gateway processor itself cannot measure the message load, and thus an additional device for measuring the load is required.
In addition, according to the existing method, the load is measured every cycle even if it is not necessary to measured the load as the amount of transmitted/received messages is small, which is not efficient.
In addition, according to the existing method, it is not possible to actively cope with communications overload because the communications interval of a message received via each channel cannot be controlled according to the message load.